"Our boys" fight against "fascist" Baltic independence

In 1990-1991, perestroika’s increasingly democratic parliamentary structures at the all-Soviet and individual republic levels led to conflicts between general and local authority. In Russia, this conflict powered the rise of Yeltsin; in many republics—especially Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—the new political landscape led to successful campaigns by anti-Soviet national parties that won majorities and then declared independence from the USSR. In Moscow, members of the Party high command felt that these republican rebellions would have to be put down by force, and that the source of the problem was Gorbachev’s commitment to democracy and reluctance to use state violence. In January 1991, the Party authorized OMON forces (similar to American SWAT teams) to take control of press, executive, and other essential organs in Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic states’ republican governments called upon their citizens to defend national independence. The resulting stand-off produced violent confrontations, with both sides claiming the other was at fault.

In Russia proper, the events unfolding in the Baltics led a number of right-wing figures and their audiences to declare support for the Soviet OMON. Alexander Nevzorov, a young journalist who came to prominence thanks to his Leningrad-based criminal round-up TV show 600 Seconds, traveled to Lithuania and Latvia to record a series of pro-Soviet reports titled Nashi (Our Guys). The present clip captures the moving parts of early 1990s Russian imperialist discourse—specifically, its capacity to unite tsarist and Soviet-era historical topoi in support of Russian military aggression. In this case, Nevzorov compares the valiant but doomed Soviet OMON troops to the White Army that refused to walk away from its call of duty in 1917. Meanwhile, the ethnonational polities opposing Soviet power are marked off as “fascists” who threaten the Russian communities living in their midst, which, per Nevzorov, gives Russia the right to interfere on their behalf. Putin’s regime deployed precisely this argument during its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

After the events in the Baltics, Nevzorov went on to found a “national-patriotic organization” under the name Nashi. The group’s rallies brought together a “red-brown” coalition of Communists, monarchists, and the far-right Russkaia Partiia (Russian Party) and Obshchestvo Pamiat’ (the Memory Society). Nevzorov and Nashi will cheerled the putschists in August 1991 and the anti-Yeltsin forces in October 1993. In 2005, the Putin regime co-opted the Nashi brand name in the service of an astroturf (fake-grassroots) Putinist movement. The same word root appeared in the slogan celebrating Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea—“Krym nash (Crimea is ours).” By then, Nevzorov was already styling himself as an opposition figure, hosting shows on the independent liberal media outlets Dozhd’ and Ekho Moskvy (both dismantled after February 2022), and running his own popular YouTube channel—while privately remaining close to the higher-ups at the Putinist Channel One. In March 2022, Nevzorov left Russia, and a few months later even applied for Ukrainian citizenship while under “absentee arrest” for spreading “fake news” about the “special military operation.”

Nevzorov’s strikingly inconsistent life trajectory is difficult to explain; still more difficult to understand is the willingness of post-Soviet liberal media outlets to take him on as a Russian liberal firebrand, given his 1990s history. Nevzorov’s current success in liberal circles does potentially reveal at least two important elements of Russian media culture. For one, it shows the extent to which Russian liberal media institutions have been and remain quite ideologically conservative, and thus able to accommodate the likes of Nevzorov in exchange for the latter changing his mind on some important issues. For another, the ease of Nevzorov’s self-transformation might point to what scholars like Sergei Prozorov have described as a fundamental “unseriousness” with which Russian media culture has tended to treat political rhetoric since the 1990s.